Moving Along

MOVING ALONG
Well Xmas is nearly here and so is the time for us to move along. My kidneys will be relieved mind you. I’ll miss working at the diner and all the friendly people we’ve met here at Kleinzee. Life for the family of foxes who come around for scraps to the diner at night will carry on. All the ostriches roaming the beachfront will carry on roaming and the wind will carry on blowing. It’s been a blast. I think I can safely say that I will now be able to recognise a West Coaster anywhere in the world by the way he tells a story with such descriptive adjectives that even the dominee finds him amusing. If he can clean a bokkom without spilling his brandy and coke and if he considers wearing shoes as being dressed up then that’s your man.
I don’t miss being surrounded by city people with their laptops, palmtops or IPod’s which are colour coded to their Rolex or new haircut while they spend lunch with their blackberry glued to their ear and handing out their business cards. Where’s the romance in that picture.
Being the romantic that I am, I’ve been thinking a lot about Adam and Eve lately. It’s something I do, letting my mind wander. Besides the fact that they could have been either angels, aliens or apes, we’ll never know since they didn’t leave any evidence behind, well none which we have found here on earth but who’s to say they were on earth in the first place and not up there in the heavens with Zeus and the other giants. What I wanna know is, what was the serpent doing in the Garden in the first place. All slippery slidey in between the fig trees looking like he couldn’t harm a fly. Don’t you think that’s a problem just waiting to happen? God must have been off on a coffee break and never saw that one coming.
We are looking forward to going to Namibia, the border being about 100 km’s from here. There’s a few things we won’t be able to take with like Theo’s 7 sins, I mean skins or his Gemsbok horns. My stone collection won’t be allowed to cross the border either so looks like Linda and Keith have a whole bunch of things to take back to Cape Town when they visit us over the new year holidays. I’m also sending a cow tail flyswatter which I’ve made for a Xmas present for my mom although I can’t imagine her actually using it unless possibly by now she’s learnt to line dance to the Waka Waka Africa then she can swish it around to get into the vibe. We’ve added a little boat, a dabchick, to our collection of stuff. We’ve tried it out on the dam at the yacht club and its cool. We will hoist it onto the roof next to the 200 litre stainless steel water container which was also given to us.
Theo is happily working his way through the half cow and all the biltong which he hung to dry in the warm crockery cupboard above the fridge and which we can’t take across the border. My Hoodia plant (appetite suppressant) also wont be allowed across so its gonna get munched some time between the Xmas cake and cookies which I baked myself. We are expecting heat, lots of space, friendly people and more heat in Namibia. Who goes to a desert country in the middle of summer? Us. We’ve decided to make a B-line to Luderitz which is on the coast and should be cooler. I wonder what awaits us.

But first, its party time for the next 2 weeks and the family is coming to join us. Can’t wait.
Dominee – priest
Bokkoms – dried fish

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY
Theo and I have put our names down on “the list” so perhaps we can buy cheap property when De Beers sells off the town of Kleinzee. It’s the perfect place for us to some day start up a little pub serving Theo’s nibblies and I could carry on dabbling in my efforts to find different things to do with all the seaweed and salt around here. I’ve smoked chunks of salt rock crystals, for culinary uses not in a roll up. It adds good flavour to food although I hope it’s not enhanced with guano or pickled miggies. I’m drying the Nori seaweed by spreading in out on my hammock in the sun, then roasting it for a few minutes drizzled with peanut and sesame oil. Then you crumble it and add it to your food as you would a spice. It tastes frigging awesome. I’ve made a good soup / seafood stock with fresh chopped Gigartina radula (that’s the stuff which looks like flappy rough riders), a dash of red wine, onions and stock. Yummy. Even Theo is impressed with my experimental dishes lately. I’m not serving him slimy green snot anymore but he draws the line at letting me wrap him in fresh seaweed then making him soak in a bath with lumps of natural salt drifting around blobs of jelly slime. Nor does he like my salted seaweed glycerine soap. It doesn’t lather so he can’t make soapy Mohicans between his nuts in the shower. People pay a fortune to go to health spas for a treatment which I’m offering for free.

One of the planned projects for Kleinzee is a frail care retirement village around the currently deserted little hospital. I fear the grannies who move in might have a hard time adjusting to this wild environment. Besides the confusing lonely robot (traffic light) stuck on the wall outside Spar, they could get blown all the way to the Port if they went for a stroll down to the beach. Dodging the wild ostriches patrolling the dunes in search of shiny things to eat and the odd fat fur seal sunning themselves on the beachfront could line them up for a pacemaker. I’ve never seen or heard of ostrich roadkill but it’s a strong possibility out here in Kleinzee and according to the manne, a true South African man has to eat his roadkill. You are expected to skin it and cook it on a fire right there on the roadside or in the unlikely event that you don’t have a bag of wood in your boot, you have to cook the meat on the cars manifold and eat it later when you arrive at your destination. Trying to wedge a dangly ostrich under your hood could be tricky I reckon.

You might have noticed that I’m becoming a bit blazѐ about hunting, me being a bit of a softie when it comes to cute furry animals and all. Well, truth is, I’ve come to grips with the fact that man is a hunter gatherer by nature. I’ve joined the good natured West coast toppies down at the abattoir for a brandy and coke (strange place for drinks you might think) when they slaughter their meat for the month (the same stuff which you buy in styrofoam bakkies from Pick ‘n Pay) and I haven’t blinked an eyelid. These guys aren’t one bit gungho and don’t swagger around with a rifle over their shoulder proclaiming their manhood. In fact they prefer free range or organic meat as apposed to eating animals penned in a cage the size of its body. Bottom line is I no longer feel like a barbarian devouring flesh when I eat meat.

I’ve really been industrious lately and quite enjoying myself. I’ve made a batch of green fig preserve and green fig jam which is a moerse lot of PT. I’m wondering how many wasps I will be eating as a by-product. The whole wasp fig tree relationship is nogal quite interesting. Did you know that fig trees go back as far as 80 million years ago and that each species (about 750) fig tree only has one species of wasp which is able to pollinate it. They therefore rely on each other for reproduction. Fig trees must have been pretty common back in Adam and Eve’s days cos Adam used a fig leaf as a loin cloth. They probably were originally vegans munching on things like pears and apricots, peaches, melons, basically everything to make a fruit salad except apples until that fateful day. Adam wouldn’t have had any animal skin lying around to cover up his suddenly exposed manhood so a fig leaf had to do. Maybe it was the result of strenuous hard work getting a soap tree to lather up (after eating a Granny Smith) and resulted in more than a hairy Mohican. But I digress from my wasp story. In most cases a female wasp squeezes herself through the tiny hole in the fig, her legs transferring fig pollen to the flowery seeds inside as she squeezes in, leaving a trail of now useless body parts. Her wings and antenna break off, and I bet she gets a tight facelift as she wedges through the tiny opening, then she lays her eggs and dies with a grin from ear to ear so to speak. That’s assuming she chose a male fig tree, otherwise she just dies and you get to eat a mouthful of dried up pregnant wasp on your jam sarmie. If things go well, the eggs hatch, they grow and the wingless males have a good time in the dark fig with all the females then they spend the remainder of their life trying to burrow an escape route for the pollen covered females to bugger off so that they can die in peace while the life of fig trees carry on as they have for millions and millions of years.
Now that the Biology class is over I’m off to swallow a spider to catch a fly and everything else living inside my stomach. I don’t know why.


Miggies- migges / dam nuisance flying bug
Manne – main guys
Toppies – old guys
Moerse – a hell of a lot of
Bakkies - container
Nogal – actually

BILTONG AND POTROAST DIKDERM

BILTONG AND POTROAST DIKDERM

Last week Theo nursed his mother yeast while I nursed a mother of a babbalas.  No he doesn’t have a fungal growth between his toes but he does have this dough besigheid under a lappie which he fiddles with every few days.  He read up about these bakeries in San Francisco who are famous for their sour dough breads. One bakery has been making sour dough bread from the original mother yeast which they’ve named Lacto Besillus San Francisco for the past 170 years.  A la de da mouthful but basically what you do is make a small ball of dough with flour and water and a pinch of salt and then every few days you add another balletjie and then when the stuff smells sour its ready to use.  You add some of this fermented dough to your actual fresh dough and after a bit more vroeteling, wala you have a sour dough bread ready to be baked. You need to keep feeding the mother yeast more little balletjies like a Tamagotchy to keep it alive. Or you could just pop down to Pick ‘n Pay and buy a packet of yeast. That’s if you aren’t after a loaf of bread as extraordinary as Theo’s or the famous bakers who live in San Francisco. 

The babbalas which I’ve been nursing is due to working behind the bar at the Crazy Crayfish where I’ve been meeting more of the locals and drinking mandatory shooters.  Last night I met Rooi Voёl. I just love the nick names these West Coast people go by.  Apparently byname goes back to the old days when many of the farmers had the same name and it was necessary to distinguish from Jan Hoender who farmed with chickens to Jan Jakkals who was popular with the ladies to Jan Petrol who owned the garage to Jan Bakoor with the lopsided head. These byname were even printed on their cheque books so the people at the bank could tell the difference. Genuine. 

Since Voortrekker days, the boere haven’t had much imagination in naming their many offspring and they still prefer to stick to tradition by keeping oupa groetjie’s namesake alive but they sure do have imagination when it comes to things like biltong and braaivleis.  I think I could write a book just on different ways of eating biltong.  The most unusual way so far is Oom Danie’s who soaks his slices in his coffee which gives the coffee a smaaklike flavour and then afterwards he chews on his coffee marinated biltong.  Natalie, the owner of the Crazy Crayfish likes to cut a few slices, not all the way through, and then sandwich slivers of garlic in between the biltong which she snacks on.  She also spruces up her potato bake with layers of sliced biltong.  These people grew up on doorstopper sarmies with lashings of butter and dik slices of biltong wedged in the middle.  They all have their own secret recipe to make their biltong and would probably suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they went without any for a week.  Usually they hunt Gemsbok to keep their supplies topped up but yesterday Theo helped them slaughter 7 cows for meat and beef biltong.  Guess what happened to the cow hides.  Yip, he brought the whole bloody lot back to the caravan park.  7 brides for 7 brothers or was it 7 hides for 7 hundred kilos of thongs.

I helped him to work the smelly tick infested hides by spreading them on black bags and he rubbed 50 kg’s of coarse salt onto the fatty side.  We left them like that overnight so that the moisture could draw out and they become pickled which prevents them from vrotting (the hides that is, not the ticks).  Next morning Theo strapped a few planks together for supports and we hung the hides for a little while for the moisture to run off.  We folded the still salted hides into black bags as air tight as we could and you can apparently store them like that for years.  Theo plans to sell a few hides to the tannery in Springbok which would help pay for our 100 kg heifer which we bought.  Alternatively we will have to build a new cupboard on the back of the truck to transport the hides so that Theo can eventually make enough bullwhips and thongs for the whole of Namibia.

My birthday came around again this year much to my disgust.   The first thing I did that morning was coil a snake around my fingers.  It was Triston’s, Natalie’s sons, pet Rat Snake which he brought around to show us.  This being the day before hungry Anchovy (they are west coasters remember) was fed his weekly tiny pink mouse.  Theo surprised me by booking us on a horse ride in Port Nolloth as a birthday present which I absolutely loved although I didn’t have the guts to break into a gallop across the sand dunes with the wind in my hair and a feeling of freedom as the horse and I became one.  Mmm I’m loosing my nerve I think although I didn’t want to look too competent on a charging horse and give Theo ideas of how to salt his biltong.  I recently read that in the Voortrekker days, some people used to wedge a chunk of spiced raw meat under their horses saddle so that it could get salted from the horse’s sweaty flanks.  Now that’s one kind of biltong I could give a miss.       

The Spar in Port Nolloth sold vetderms which I think excited Theo much more than the horse ride did.  He grabbed the last packet of the stuff and excitedly dragged me off to make a fire to cook the coiled slippery stuff.  Before you go eeuuuw, what do you think they use for sausage casing?  Theo braaied the marinated derms until they were crispy and quite tasty although I suspect your heart will stop if you eat the fatty stuff on a regular basis.  We washed it down with champagne and Theo boiled the last 2 pieces to extract the fat.  He wants to make a lard mixture to rub into the leather thongs when he plaits his bullwhips. 

Well I’ve gotta go now.  I want to see if the ticks have crawled off the 7 cow tails so that we can turn them into 7 flyswatters.

Babbalas - hangover

Besigheid - business

Lappie - cloth

Balletjie – small ball

Vroetel - fiddle

Byname – nick name

Hoender - chicken

Jakkals – Jackal

Bakoor – cauliflower ears

Boere - farmers

Oupa groetjie – great great grandfather

Braai Vleis – barbeque meat

Oom - uncle

Smaaklike - tasty

Dik – fat

Vrotting - rotting

Derms – casing

Vetderms – Colon

Rooi Voёl – Red bird (in this case-  Red dick / penis)

   

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE
A day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee is literally going off to pick up your own salt directly from mother earth. How freaking awesome is that!
Today we jumped on the XT for a ride down to the deserted yacht club, accompanied for a kilometre or two by a panic stricken steenbokkie who finally dashed off while 7 ostriches ran alongside us, not even 100m away, in their prehistoric-like gait before disappearing over the dunes. The yacht club dam is no longer in use but instead it’s become a salt bay. We were amazed at the fantastic crystals which had naturally built up over time, caking the whole perimeter. We chopped off a whole bunch of salt rocks to take back and now I’m a regte soutie.
It seems people have been using salt since the late stone age. That’s like a moer of a long time ago that people have been using the stuff to preserve food. Fred Flintsone and his tjomma, Barney, probably stood around the braai as they did most nights and as it should be, cooking their Gemsbok steaks, the home brew or magic mushrooms just kicking in and discussing their kill and how it put hairs on a mans chest, back, face and knuckles. Perhaps Wilma was in the cooking area sharing ideas with her sisters about what to do with the left over pieces of hide after making a karos bedspread. By then they would have already been using salt to season their bulbs or other ratatouli veggie dishes since there would have been natural salt pans to be found and being exploratory entrepreneurs, they would have stock piled the stuff for bartering. Maybe that night things got excited as the men chased the women around the braai, dragged them by the hair, you know, the usual foreplay stuff, and maybe that’s when the salt jug fell over onto the wild boar hindleg which Fred was saving for midnight munchies. No-one would have noticed till the next week, what with the rain and the females excited about the new hide mini skirts they were making and the men off hunting and looking for sharp stones to trim their hairy knuckles and to make goatees. And that leg my friend, lying in a salt puddle, could have been the first Parmaham eaten by Neolithic man.
These days salt has got many more functions that just preserving fish, meat and vegetables. For instance it’s used in many descriptive phrases in the Oxford dictionary and the Bible. “The salt of the earth” is a term used to describe these West Coast people. Taken with “a pinch of salt” is probably how you could interpret the story of Little Lotta when she turned back to look at her sinful orgy city and next moment she turned into a pillar of salt.

More salt is used to make pulp, paper, soap, fabric dyes and detergents that actual condiments which only uses 17% of the whole world’s salt. And then its soooo refined and chemically enhanced that it’s hardly of value. Eish now that’s almost like rubbing salt in the wound.
The Chinese were the first recorded people to actually mine the stuff out of the bowels of the Earth. That’s where the really good stuff comes from, deep down, because its been compressed over millions and millions of years and the minerals which salt is made of, being sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium have had enough time to form magical crystals which are full of transmittable energy. So, if you wear a salt crystal around your neck, not only will you never have to eat bland food again cos you could just use your stone necklace like a salt lick, but you could attract all the dust bunnies in your house like a static feather duster and best of all, if there’s a power failure you might still be able to use your washing machine cos salt is charged with electrolytes. I find these electrolytes quite intriguing although I must say it’s all a bit too scientific for me. I never partook in those school experiments using salt and a battery is probably why I don’t get it. Under normal circumstances I’m quite electrically charged. I use to hate opening my car door because I knew a shock was waiting to jar me into reality and then when I got to work another one would be lined up when I closed my car door. Sometimes I tried to avoid the electric surge by shutting the door with my elbow pressed against the window but the charge would remain in my body and catch me out when I opened the toilet door. These days I don’t drive much but I wonder what would happen if put a few of these salt rocks in my pocket and went to work in the bar with the metal fridge door.

Mmm that could give new meaning to a depth charger. OOhhh the thrills of working a day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee are never ending.


Regte soutie – real English through and through
Moer – heck
Tjomma - friends
Braai - barbeque
Karos – leather patch work throw
Eish – Golly gee whizz

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

This week I ate fresh seaweed which I picked from the sea myself and my taste buds had a few surprises.  It’s been a week of discovery.  I’ve been carting the back page ripped out of a Village Life magazine around with me for the last year.  It had intriguing recipes using seaweed but I never actually got around to trying them, until now.

Wikipedia informed me that seaweed has more nutritional value than many land vegetables and in fact contains Vitamin B12 which is in not found in any land veggie and which is very good for you.  There are different types of seaweed on different coastlines and they can be used in different ways.  Some taste meaty, some are eaten fresh and others are good for sushi.  We’ve bought dried sheets of seaweed from the Chinese food shops before to make sushi but that’s not the same as actually getting the fresh stuff.  I’ve now found out that I’m eating the seaweed called Nori when Theo makes sushi.

Now before you incorrectly assume that I’m a health freak living on nuts and sprouts and analyse everything which I put into my body let me just remind you that living with Theo 24 -7 does not allow for that.  I’m not skinny with pasty skin either, in fact I’m getting rounder by the day. The nuts we eat are in his home baked bread which we snack on with lavishings of butter.  I do make my own sprouts from mung beans which I buy from the Chinese food shops while Theo stocks up on sushi ingredients and other strange things like fermented black eggs or packets of odd looking curly things which we never know what the hell they are since they only have Chinese writing on the packets and the Chinese shop owners don’t speak much English at all.  Nevertheless, Theo loves experimenting with all the exotic things and I make my sprouts to put on cheese sandwiches with lavishings of butter in between eating lots of meat, fried food and Theo’s endless assortment of breads.                       

Theo has also made devine seafood dishes by stuffing sea bamboo with perlemoen (abalone) when it was still legal to collect the gift from the sea gods, or mussels taken out their shells or alikreukel.  You shove them down the bamboo, alternating with a chunk of garlic now and then, and seal the end with a thick piece of rolled up ribbon fronds from the bamboo.  You plonk the bamboo onto the coals and the food steams inside.  We slice the bamboo open but only eat the seafood inside, which has a delicious flavour from the bamboo.  Next time I’m gonna take a bite of the bamboo as well.

I never thought about eating seaweed before.  I mean, jeez the Chinese and Japanese who are healthy, live on the stuff so why the hell shouldn’t I give it a try.  And it’s free, just sitting there on the rocks for the picking.    

So there I was, on the beachfront at Kleinzee, poking around in rock pools looking for Gigartina radula.  It’s brown and covered in knobbly bumps which reminded me of a sheeps tongue but felt like a slab of squeaky rubbery plastic.  I boiled my firm knobbly rubber for 7 minutes as per the recipe by which time the caravan smelt like the depths of the ocean.  Once the stuff is boiled, not too long or it becomes slimy (ah there’s the rub) you can do a whole bunch of things with it.  I tried the first recipe which was fritters.  I dipped the now floppy bright green knobbly leaves in batter and deep fried them.  They tasted awesome.  Not salty or slimy but more meaty and had a good texture.  Theo enjoyed them.  I was keen to try the more healthy ideas, since if you’re gonna eat stuff the colour of grass you might as well go all the way.  The next day I made a egg Tortilla (that’s a fancy name for a Spanish omelette if you didn’t know).  I used some of the bright green chopped gooey leaves which I’d boiled the previous day.  They’d become a bit slimy but I wasn’t going to be put off as I draped the luminous green stuff over the diced potatoes in the pan and added a few cherry tomatoes to balance the brightness of my colourful eggs.  Theo tried a mouthful but made a face saying it was too slimy for him.  He eats snails and oysters so baa, why not my seaweed.  I encouraged him to try more, saying he wasn’t giving it a chance.  Anyway, I endure all his strange concoctions like 100year old fermented eggs and sheeps heads and fish eyes and chilli which makes me dread bowel movements for the next week.  I ate my slimy green eggs (no ham) with a determined grimace as the food slid down my throat.  He could at least pretend.   

Tomorrow he’s getting a vegetable bake with seaweed layers and then I still want to try the yummy sounding tomato soup with floating green bits.  And he better not pull a face otherwise I’m headed back to the rocks in search of the fronzy green lettuce seaweed which you eat raw and I’ll stick it on his cheese sandwich instead of my sprouts which he loves so much.              

Mmmm, maybe that’s why I never get a chance to cook.

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES AND THE CYCAMORE TREES

You send shivers up my spine

Do that to me one more time

Look at me, Look at me

Natures Toys

Red hot for you

Wanna share my morsel

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES AND THE CYCAMORE TREES

The birds around here are having a big fat jol. Its spring and they are flirting and fluffing like mad and stuffing themselves with insects and berries as they rush from tree to tree in the chase. It’s a bit like watching people on a night out on the town, except without the booze so there’s no waking up next to a stranger on a park bench in your underwear the next morning and feeling guilty. In fact there’s no guilt in animal procreation, just pleasure.
Many male species of antelope get very excited as they chase the females around then stick their noses up the females’ displayed end to check how horny they are. Some even go as far as gargling with a mouthful of the female’s urine and pucker their lips as if they are swirling a good red wine. I hope sheep don’t do the whole phlegmy tasty thing cos I’ve just remembered the curled lips and blanched tongue of the sheep’s head which I ate at the Calvinia Vleisfees.
Some snakes have 2 penises, ooee lucky them, while some drone bees loose theirs in a moment of ecstasy as they explode their whole tool box into the queen bees vaginal clamp. Ouch. Many male insects have their heads bitten off by the very excited females while they are still on the job and other male spiders become midnight munchies for the satisfied females. You’d think they’d have learnt their lesson after millions of years but clearly getting laid is more important. Poor male songbirds on the other hand don’t even have a penis yet they still get all a flutter at the thought of rubbing themselves against a willing female to touch vents.
Right now I’m watching the birds bonking in the Bitou bushes. The males are having noisy singing competitions to get the attention of the females who sometimes also join in. It’s sort of like what goes on in a noisy Irish pub except without the alcohol making it much easier for the birds to hold a note and harmonise in B flat. The males are fluffing themselves up and prancing around showing off their bright new spring colours, the same way that guys do their disco moves on the dance floor after a few tequilas. The females are coyly watching the display, urging them on and a fight is about to break out as the testosterone levels reach their limit. I watch a male chase his competition away and return to feed a berry to a flushed female in a last desperate act to get laid. He succeeds after all his efforts and she lets him touch vents for half a second. Most male animals don’t have much else to do other than eat and bonk so that’s probably why he doesn’t have time for a smoke break before being distracted by another inviting female. Mrs bird, who has just recently got her socks off, stocks up on the abundant berries and insects as any pregnant mother would and contemplates the most effective way to get hubby to follow her back to the nest. “I’ll bite your head off if you don’t come home with me right now” is a common line used by female praying mantises. Mmph, the conniving lengths some females go to.

It’s all about pheromones, hormones and testosterones. Animals must have high sex drives since yes they do seem to be preoccupied with spreading their genes but they do also enjoy getting laid. Foreplay can take days to play itself out before being culminated with the actual deed. Most female mammals and a few other species have a clitoris so yes they must enjoy it just as much as the horny males. Female mammals have a oestrus cycle releasing pheromones which drive the horny males into a frenzy. You don’t wanna cross the path of a male elephant is musth who can smell an inviting female from kilometres away. Move out the way. Horny bull coming through. So what happens the rest of the time. They still get horny. You don’t just stop thinking about getting lucky and I bet they have wet dreams. That’s why they try to bonk anything that moves. In fact it doesn’t even have to move. A rock will do but if they could get hold of a blow up doll I’m pretty sure it would be their first choice. Many primates give themselves a hand job, or even help each other out. And don’t think hand made tools used to reach into termite hills are the only tools out there in the wild either. National Geographics doesn’t tell you about the wooden dildos crafted by Orangutans. Next time you see a female elephant carrying a sausage tree pod around you’ll know what I mean.
So what’s the difference between the mating game of animals and humans?..... PMS?

THIS TOWN, IS COMING LIKE A GHOST TOWN

THIS TOWN, IS COMING LIKE A GHOST TOWN

All the clubs have closed down.  The pottery club, the photographic club and the sports club are just some of the deserted buildings but Kleinzee is special and I’ve fallen in love with the town.  It’s made up of about 30 or so different types of characters in a ghost town setting.  There used to be about 4 000 or so employees working for De Beers diamond mines but now that they are no longer mining here, the remaining people are finishing things off and there’s big talk of a boom happening in January when De Beers sells off all the vacant houses.  The die hards are patiently waiting as they have been for the last few years.

Simon has already become my favourite customer at the Crazy Crayfish.  He usually blows in to the diner barefoot and in his pyjamas and we discuss important issues about humanity which I never seem to be able to remember much of the next morning.  It could be my brain is so full of information which I’ve been accumulating these last few months or it could be due to Jugermeister which I’ve come to enjoy and which no longer tastes like Vicks Acta Plus.  He often brings his Jack Russel along but when the family of Cape Foxes come around and creep right up to the door for scraps, the dog gets too excited and Simon takes him home.  I’m holding thumbs there’s a litter of Fox pups safely stashed away in a hole somewhere.  Brown Hyenas (Strand Wolfe) roam around here as well but they comb the beach front and the golf course for food.  We nearly bumped right into a little Steenbokkie late one night walking back from the diner.  The poor thing left skid marks in the dust as it dashed round the corner barely a foot away from us.  I got such a skrik I nearly left my own skid marks.     

Miskiet, a Crazy Crayfish regular, has a busy life hunting game on a neighbouring farm or diving for crayfish and fishing and driving his 4x4 to isolated beach front spots or fitting his beach buggie with a moerse V8 or some or other turbo charged engine or buying rounds of Jugermeister. 

Kai is also a regular.  He is Finish and is the local baker. He makes a Pantoffel loaf which is a strange baguette hollowed out in the shape of a stokie slipper and which I think is as odd as his sense of humour. 

Que has a oyster farm which seems to do very well and he has the concession to harvest seaweed which he exports.  He is always rushing around everywhere.  He’s given me some dried seaweed to make jelly which I’m dying to try out.  Mmmm perhaps Tequila shooters.    

Yesterday we explored the surrounding area and met Rocky, Karen and Timo, arty surfers who live on a piece of farm ground on the beach front.  They have the most awesome view of their own private beachfront in a remote setting. Karen & Rocky sailed the world in their yacht for eight years but now it’s moored in Cape Town and they make their living by mining the shoreline for diamonds and ride the waves in their spare time.  They have to wait for the sea to be just right to be able to get their mining pipe down among the rocks so they have loads of free time to catch a wave. 

We visited Noup which is about 40 km out of town and is a remote cluster of authentically restored old diamond divers cottages in a beautiful setting.  Perfect for romantic getaways and when its crayfish season the place is fully booked according to Dudley, the owner.  He liked Theo’s XT Thumper and I liked all his pebbles.  As we stood chatting about the guided 4 x 4 shipwreck tours which he offers, he harry casually scratched around in the pebbles and picked up a tiny fossilized mussel, a petrified piece of wood, a fossilized piece of elephant enamel, and a fossilized fish ear bone.  He blew my mind when he told me they were all 80 million years old.  Wow, to be able to touch something that lived on the earth that long ago is just wow.  Big time wow.  He’s a geologist and has offered to ID my stone collection. Cool, I’ll be back and I’d love to see his prehistoric megalodon sharks teeth which he collected from Hondeklip bay, not too far from here.  That’s what I love about this place, it’s untouched, undiscovered and uninhabited.  Well except for the areas which De Beers have mutilated.  But still, it feels like I’m in virgin country recently pioneered by diamond diggers.

I’ve met a few of the more traditional west coast locals who live here in Kleinzee and they all live up to their name of being friendly. I love the Namakwaland style of putting words together and it has become apparent to me that I’m gonna be doing a lot of kuiering here in Kleinzee and less soul searching.  Finding the meaning of life is hard work with a construction team doing renovations inside your head so I’m up for a bit of partying. Oh hell, life here on the wild front is tough.  

Moerse – very big

skrik  - fright

Miskiet - Misquito

kuiering – party sessions

Diamonds are Forever

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

And so is the destruction in its wake.

We are back in Kleinzee and looking forward to sitting vas here in the small town with a big drinking problem and a small mining problem. After exploring the surrounding area including a bit of the Rigtersveld Park we were keen to start working at the Crazy Crayfish restaurant and meet the local yocals. The road between Alexander Bay and Port Nolloth was quiet so I had my first driving lesson. Yeehaa – now I’ve driven the truck
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All I can say about Alexander Bay is that it’s wedged in the most north western hoekie of South Africa where the Orange River empties into the ocean. It’s not really a town, but rather a dusty bland vaal sandy place where diamond mining has drastically devastated hundreds of km’s of the coastline and eliminated all signs of plant life leaving mounds of barren dunes with buggerall nutrients. By now I imagine you’ve realised I’m not keen on diamonds. In fact that’s probably why Theo married me, not because I’m clever, sexy, funny, or humble but because I don’t require expensive shiny jewellery in exchange for sex. Oh yes, did I mention that I’ve finally driven the truck
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We travelled east following the Orange River as it wound its way through the dry arid desert hoping to find a place to stop and do some fishing. It’s difficult to distinguish between some of the bare natural koppies in the dessert and the koppies created by piles and piles of gravel deposited by diamond mining even within the Rigtersveld National Park at the Sendlingsdrift area. We camped at Potjiespram and walked along the Orange River filling our pockets with more stones to add to our collection. Even Theo is hooked now and has a packet full of unpolished tigers eye. I’m not sure what the point is of driving around with a box full of stones on the back of the truck but we can’t seem to stop picking them up. So yes, I have driven the truck and it rocks!

The dry heat sucked out any speck of moisture or sweat before it had a chance to escape my pores and my dusty skin felt like the dry scales of a snake. The scenery of nothingness against a backdrop of majestic blue mountains creates its own unsurpassed beauty which had such a relaxing effect on me that I barely noticed my dried out nostrils, burning eyeballs or crevices in my heels. We were only about 100km into the Rigtersveld Park, so I wondered what the real desert in Namibia would be like. Yikes. We’ve decided we will wait for winter before we cross the border
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On our way back near Wondergat, a natural sinkhole in the rocks where the Namas believe a giant snake spirit lives, we came across a little oasis at a dried up riverbed. Someone lived there in a plastic covered maatjies hut with his own little camped off veggie garden so we sommer stopped there overnight. I was hoping to meet the owner but he was nowhere to be found. We assumed he was a herder judging by the amount of drolletjies around, and had probably moved his goats in search of better grazing grounds in the harsh environment. I felt like an intruder peeping through his makeshift door at some of his worldly possessions, a dented pot or two on a little wooden shelf, a chair and his neatly made up bed. It seemed that he expected to find everything as he had left it when he returned months later, even his veggie garden seemed to be doing ok on its own. I wondered if he had asked Heitsi Eibib, the snake spirit to watch over his stuff while he journeyed on foot across the desert. According to Nama legend the snake spirit sometimes appears as an irresistible young maiden and lures men into its deep black hole to devour them. Perhaps he had got lonely and had finally succumbed to the deceptive spirit. Either way, I respected his space for the 2 days which we hung around there and I didn’t wander across to the big black hole.

Food for thought – I wonder if a spirit guarding your stuff wouldn’t be more effective than SAPS?!?
PS. I’ve driven the truck and I’ts awesome!
Vas - tight
hoekie - corner
vaal - bland
Koppies – hills
Maatjies – traditional reed ma
Sommer – just (what the hell, if not why not)
Drolletjies - poop

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

I’m really fascinated by how different these West Coast people are and what spending time with them does to a persons innerste. These people don’t have degrees as long as your arm but they do know where to find crayfish the length of a mans arm and their stories are just as long and fleshy. The higher up the diamond mining coast we travelled the more interesting the people became. I mean, there we were, parked on the beachfront in Port Nolloth, minding our own business, checking out the diamond boats, when this couple stopped off and before you could say potsnot we had moved to their place to drink lots of beer and listened to the Ewings and the doings of Port Nolloth. Andre has a tow truck business and is your typical a grease monkey, although he seemed more of a placid monkey covered in grease. His wife Ria is, well lets just say she’s a very colourful character. She started a non profit animal shelter and does a wonderful job of rescuing the neighbourhoods abused cats and dogs, all at her own expense. Her method of collecting these animals is on a take no prisoners system as she cruizes the neighbourhood with a long beer, a baton and a vengeful glare. Being a mercenary is more her calling I think. She even sorts out the drug dealers here (apparently Port Nolloth the drug mecca of the West Coast) and isn’t afraid to smash a car windows or a face if anyone gives her problems. She says people here either have too much money (the ones who strike it lucky with diamonds) or too little (the ones who spend all their money on drugs). By the end of the evening I had heard all about the illicit diamond dealings of the towns main kanonie and how lucrative the Nigerians drug business was and about all the poor mange dogs in the townships. And here I thought Port Nolloth was a sleepy little sea side village with plenty of fish. I didn’t question her in case I got head butted but the next day in Spar Supermarket I scrutinized everyone pushing their trolleys around and wondered if they had a hidden cache of diamonds tucked away or if they were high from snorting kilos of coke.

Another out of the ordinary character we came across was Oom Josef at Lekkersing, a village in the harsh middle of nowhere. We headed there because the brochures led us to expect a Nama village with matjies huisies all touristy like and I was hoping to chat to the people there and find out more about edible and medicinal plants. Yip, I’m still hoping to find Kougoed (Sceletium tortousum) while everyone else is hoping to find diamonds. I’ve grown really fond of my Hoodia plant and every day when we stop driving for the day, I lovingly put it outside in the sun and feel guilty about it being cooped up inside. The other day the moerkoffie kettle fell over and drenched the poor plant in coffee grinds and I apologised profusely to it. (in my head of course so Theo didn’t hear and think I’m going cuckoo). When I do eventually try a bite of the appetite suppressant plant a bit of caffeine thrown in can surely only add to its effectiveness. I often give my beautiful stones plakked on the dashboard a good morning smile when I climb into the cab. Maybe I should get a dog but actually I’m finding the concept of positive energy to be quite rewarding.
Anyway back to Lekkersing. The people who lived there were Busters who lived in old houses, some were pretty corrugated houses which looked as old as the original settlers and were probably historical. The town offered nothing in the way of tourism but we stopped to chat to the friendly brown people with blue eyes. Theo was hoping to find someone to teach him how to plait a whip so we stopped to ask a group of guys if they knew of anyone but we were first invited into the shed to look at a caracal hide which a proud boy told us he and his dogs had killed. They pointed out Oom Josef’s house and said he knew how to plait leather. Oom Josef didn’t seem to have a busy afternoon planned and was quite willing to show Theo how it’s done so we spent a couple of hours hunched on home made riempie chairs on his stoep. He was as old as toeka se dae and I would have loved to have spent more time with him but the clouds were rolling in and Theo got worried about the corrugated dirt road ahead so we rattled on and hoped no body parts worked themselves loose and fell off. We had a long dusty road ahead and it surely would lead to somewhere.
innerste – insides – the place where good feelings come from
Potsnot – translated to pot of snot but actually means bullshit
Kanonie – head honcho
Matjies huisies– mat houses which the Nama people live in
Moerkoffie – ground coffee boiled in a kettle
Plakked - stuck
Riempie – leather thong - not the one’s you wear – the ones used to make furniture
Stoep – veranda
toeka se dae – days gone by

KLEINZEE NEXT TO THE BIG C

KLEINZEE NEXT TO THE BIG C
We zoomed through busy Springbok asap. We grabbed a bunch of brochures to email our CV’s to guesthouses in hopes of getting a job since our cash was running low, and then we headed into the wild wild west. Theo’s homemade Bokkoms no longer hung at the back of the truck so someone might have got smacked with a flying dead fish on the N7 somewhere between Bitterfontein and Springbok or alternatively we probably had a lot of people confused about road kill in the Namakwaland as 15 fish lay scattered across the tarmac amongst the odd Springbokkie and Bat Eared Fox.
We made a quick stop at the Namakwa National park but I’m afraid to say that all that stood out for me (it was only a 2 hour stop for a little walk about) was their goat biltong which was very tasty. Ja you see a lot of donkeys, goats and dassies out here between the rocks, fynbos and the succulents. The only big 5 is our vyfman Namakwaland doos wyn. You could find Veldkool (Trachyandra cilliata), which grows wild and can be cooked as you would green beans although they look like asparagus heads. That and suurvye (Carpobrotus edulis) (which are lekker to suck when they are nearly dry) are the only edible plants which I’m familiar with out here. I’m still saving the Hoodia gordonii for later – a bit like end of the month crackers.
Our gas bottle ran out on the way to Kleinzee which is 100 km from Springbok so once again we had to work our way through the contents of the freezer. Luckily the funny smelling pork chops or chicken had no side effects. We pickled a lot of the mussels and Theo made crumbed mussels twice a day and devine mussel soup.

Kleinzee is owned by De Beers so you have to get a permit to stay overnight and show your ID at the gates to the town. This is diamond country and they are big on security even though De Beers has sort of finished mining and are now rehabilitating the area. Anyway we had to pay for accommodation for the first time in almost a month since leaving Cape Town but you can’t just sommer stop along the roadside once you enter the area owned by De Beers.
We arranged to stay at Kleinzee caravan park for 2 days and within hours of meeting Charles, owner of the small caravan park and yes another friendly west coast local, he and Theo got chatting over a slet sap (better known as a brutal fruit to everyone else) and next thing we had a job. Turns out Charles needs someone to help him run his restaurant called the Crazy Crayfish since he was off to build a oil rig in some or other African country where the money is good. He is going to arrange a house for us to rent in the deserted Kleinzee mining village.
The small kitchen and busy bar accommodates the 30 locals and apparently lots of 4x4 tourists, surfers and divers who pass through.
Charles doesn’t beat around with words and either calls a spade a spade or a naai. He has a gentle refined side as well since besides being married to a very nice English woman, every night he comes down to the caravan park to tumble dry the cat”s blanket to make sure Asblik sleeps warmly in his cat tree house. Last night he brought us and his friend Jakes each a Gemsbok liver the size of a soccer ball. We might spend a few days with Jakes, who also happens to be a missionary and a very keen fisherman on the Orange River. Sounds like he has been around the block and most of Africa since he has been a builder, a bouncer and after hearing about his drunken past, quite a boxer. He used to think the worm in the bottom of a Tequila bottle was for girls so he and die manne used a scorpion or even a Puff Adder instead.
We will go back to help Charles at the Cazy Crayfish in October but in the meantime we want to explore Port Nolloth where the real diamond cowboys are at and then next week hopefully off to the Orange River with Jakes and his Bible.

Footnote: If you made rollmops as per my previous blog they will flop since I forgot to mention you should salt your bokkom fillets first and you might want to water your vinegar down a bit.

Bokkoms – dried fish, salty as hell, best eaten with a cold beer
Dassie – Hyrax (the biggest, common, most spotted mammal in the Cape)
vyfman Namaqualand doos wyn – 5 Litre box wine
lekker - yummy
Sommer – just like that, If not why not
slet sap – slut juice
naai – f*cker, idiot, arsehole – depends on your mood or how much slet sap you’ve had
die manne – the tough guys

The Answer my Friend is Blowing in the Wind

CHANGED WEBSITE

I’m back on myjourney-debby.blogspot.com again. If you’re wondering what happened to my last 6 months of entries you can track me on www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Bundubash/ to catch up and find out what we’ve been up to.
For quick link to missing entries go to www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Bundubash/


The Answer my Friend is Blowing in the Wind

It was time to leave our new friends behind as well as the colourful stories of Oom Willem and Oom Jan. We left the coast without seeing any limbs floating in the waves as the oomies reckon that the sharks don’t like the taste of black people and spit out their arms and legs. (except, they stated, the one case which is recorded in the Guinness book of records where a black person was actually eaten up). We didn’t see any flowers either as we turned inland towards the N7 and headed north on our journey out of the Namaqualand. No flowers to be seen here at all this year so don’t plan a trip around viewing blommetjies unless of course you are just looking for an excuse to meet the friendly west coast inhabitants and soak up all this peaceful space.
I’ve collected a dozen or 2 of the most beautiful stones I’ve ever seen. The beach is full of them and I find them so therapeutic to touch and look at that I somer stuck them onto the trucks dashboard (as apposed to truck driver teddy bears) and I’ve decorated my Hoodia gordonii (which as previously mentioned I’m saving for when the budget gets tight) potplant with colourful pebbles. I even have extra pebbles for the herb garden which I plan to cultivate although not sure where, possibly on the roof. The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind.
Our freezer, yes its working again, is stocked up with Hotnots fish which we bought from the locals at Lamberts Bay for R60 a bunch, making it R15 / fish, each one nearly the length of your forearm. Our freezer is also bulging with loads of black mussels as well as white mussels for fishing bait. Theo made a few jars of rollmops from the Harders which he bought from the locals at Papendorp at R1/ Harder. It’s quite easy to make but working at an outside sink is best since it’s a fishy besigheid. Scale and gut them, cut out the 2 fillets and trim any remaining little bones. Roll them up with a pickle in the middle, stick a toothpick through it and pop them into a jar of vinegar. Add 4 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar for good measure and salt to taste. Leave for a week or as long as you can stand before eating. Serve with biscuits, good wine and a squeeze. Theo also bottled some in a sherry and vinegar mixture and another lot in a chilli fish spice vinegar but we must still proof taste them.
Our homemade bokkoms (salted Harders) got nicely air dried as they swayed on the back of the truck. Hopefully they don’t turn out to be too dusty as other travellers overtook us, exchanging a wave, a smile and dust clouds.
We stopped at Bitterfontein for a cold beer and to stretch our legs. We drink gallons of water as we travel but now and then a person needs a Black Label to wash down the dust. The hotel bar looked closed up so we drifted down the road towards the back packers where John and Dawn welcomed us into their back packer home and we spent the afternoon chatting and learning about the town’s inhabitants. John and Dawn are inkommers even though they’ve settled there for 5 years. Being English probably doesn’t help. John told us that his neighbour runs the town, to the extent that he even dictates / suggests what they should plant in their garden. Sounded like big fish in a small pond syndrome. John is a friendly chap (albeit toothless since he is in the process of major dental work and compares himself to Tom Cruize without a bite). He said that a good sense of humour and lack of teeth was all that prevented him from biting off his neighbours legs since every time he and Dawn went into Vredenburg to do their major shopping, his neighbour would jump over the fence and rip out any plants which he didn’t like or didn’t deem suitable. I assume he favours indigenous plant life. His other neighbour runs around in a fishnet tutu.
They’ve had some interesting visitors at their guest house. From cyclists (why the Dutch and Germans like peddling a packhorse bicycle around Africa never ceases to amaze me) to a tiny Japanese couple who stayed for two weeks surviving on rice and noodles, to a man lugging a big wooded cross on his back all over the show.
It seems all kinds of people are attracted to the gramadoelas for their own reasons. I’m hoping to meet as many as possible.
Oomies - uncles not necessarily related but older than you
Blommetjies – flowers
Besigheid – business affair
inkommers – non local outsider
gramadoelas – in the middle of nowhere